Google to Pay $8.5mn for Illegally Sharing Users Data*

Hwaairfan's Blog

Google to Pay $8.5mn for Illegally Sharing Users Data*

By Elizabeth Warmerdam

Google will pay $8.5mn, most of it to non-profit organizations, to settle a class action that claimed that it illegally divulged users’ search information to third parties, a federal judge ruled.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila granted final approval to the settlement on March 31, finding that distributing the money to non-profits instead of class members was appropriate.

Davila also found that the settlement was reasonable even though Google will not have to stop disclosing search queries.
The consolidated class action accused Google of routinely passing on private information through “referrer headers,” which provided the website the user was visiting with the URL of the referring page. The URL included the search terms typed in by the user.
Personal information passed on through these referrer headers could include users’ names, IP addresses, their confidential medical information, their…

View original post 661 more words